Tobias Loddenkemper

As a pediatrician, pediatric neurologist, and clinical neurophysiologist, with specific training in seizure monitoring and treatment, I spend approximately 40% of my time in investigation, 20% in direct clinical care, 10% in teaching activities, and 30% in significant supporting activities. My early research experience as a resident and fellow included observational and interventional studies on clinical seizure manifestations and treatment. Following my 2008 appointment as Assistant in Neurology at Boston Children’s Hospital, I expanded my research to include circadian variation of seizures and used this information to develop a patient-oriented medication treatment schedule. My research is focused on identifying the factors that determine epileptic encephalopathies and status epilepticus as well as functional outcome later in life. Repetitive seizures and epileptic encephalopathy can impair development, plasticity and cognitive function of eloquent areas including language and memory. Seizure frequency reduction and seizure freedom, in particular after epilepsy surgery, have been shown to improve neurocognitive and developmental outcome. By identifying biomarkers that indicate predictors of cerebral damage and developmental outcome in epileptic encephalopathies and status epilepticus, we intend to reduce the occurrence of brain damage and later developmental disabilities and aim to identify novel therapeutic approaches.

What are we doing?

- Comparative effectiveness and interventional clinical trials in pediatric status epilepticus and epileptic encephalopathies

How do we do it?

- Inventing, evaluating and implementing clinically relevant biomarkers and treatment paradigms to assess and benchmark these based on clinical data, neurophysiology, imaging, pharmacogenomics and genetics, in collaboration with basic researcher locally, nationally, and internationally.

- Developing and evaluating monitoring tools for clinical biomarkers to further clinical epilepsy outcome measures including seizure characterization, neuropsychological outcome assessment, and quality of life assessment by means of seizure sensors and electronic tools including ICISS, the RENCI seizure tracking and outcome prediction modeling software, and novel in- and outpatient monitoring devices and algorithms, and neurophysiological, biochemical and genetic periodicity markers and implement these techniques into clinical workflow.

- Research networks and collaborations are essential for our work, like the pediatric status epilepticus research group (www.pserg.org), the Pediatric Epilepsy Research Consortium , the pediatric critical care epilepsy research group, the Critical Care EEG consortium, the pediatric neurocritical care research group and other consortia.